Linux User Share Hits a Multi-Year High On Steam For May 2025 (gamingonlinux.com) 81
Linux user share on Steam rose to 2.69% in May 2025 -- the highest level recorded since at least 2018. GamingOnLinux reports: Overall user share for May 2025:
- Windows 95.45% -0.65%
- Linux 2.69% +0.42%
- macOS 1.85% +0.23%
Even with SteamOS 3 now being a little more widely available, the rise was not from SteamOS directly. Filtering to just the Linux numbers gives us these most popular distributions:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 30.95% -2.83%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 10.09% +0.64%
- Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit 7.76% +1.56%
- Freedesktop SDK 24.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 7.42% +1.01%
- Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 4.63% +0.01%
- Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS 64 bit 4.30% -0.14%
- CachyOS 64 bit 2.54% +2.54%
- EndeavourOS Linux 64 bit 2.44% -0.02%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 2.43% -0.18%
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.17% -0.06%
- Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) 64 bit 1.99% -0.28%
- Other 23.27% -2.27%
- Windows 95.45% -0.65%
- Linux 2.69% +0.42%
- macOS 1.85% +0.23%
Even with SteamOS 3 now being a little more widely available, the rise was not from SteamOS directly. Filtering to just the Linux numbers gives us these most popular distributions:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 30.95% -2.83%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 10.09% +0.64%
- Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit 7.76% +1.56%
- Freedesktop SDK 24.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 7.42% +1.01%
- Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 4.63% +0.01%
- Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS 64 bit 4.30% -0.14%
- CachyOS 64 bit 2.54% +2.54%
- EndeavourOS Linux 64 bit 2.44% -0.02%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 2.43% -0.18%
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.17% -0.06%
- Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) 64 bit 1.99% -0.28%
- Other 23.27% -2.27%
Only 97.31% more to go! (Score:5, Funny)
2025 is the year of the Linux desktop!!!
Re: Only 97.31% more to go! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well it's about twice as high as macos at the moment, so there's that.
Re: eh (Score:3, Funny)
Why, are monks primarily into barebacking? It's not like religious figures who have promised not to have sex don't have sex.
Re: (Score:1)
MacOS is becoming less useful for unixy-type things like software development because so much of the terminal is rotting away (a combination of GPL3 antagonism, and MacOS being ridiculously locked down in newer versions)
No, that's not why. Macos terminal is not and never was GPL; it was always proprietary. It sucks because apple doesn't pay any attention to it, probably because it's not cool to the dominant crowd of macos users: Hipsters.
Though I suspect you're confusing 'terminal' with 'bash', because their version of it is the last non-gplv3 version, which is like 20 years old now. When I talk about a terminal, I'm talking about the actual terminal emulator that renders the text that your shell runs in. The one apple mad
Re: (Score:2)
The Mac is just fine for gaming (Score:1)
MacOS is great for many things but gaming is not one of them.
The Mac is just fine for gaming. Sure it's more expensive, so if gaming is your primary reason to get a computer you'll probably get a Windows PC. However many people get computers for other reasons and that leads them to Mac and Linux. These folks may want to play games too. The real problem with Mac gaming lies with game studio upper management. That's another story, a long one. Short answer, they are leaving money on the table when they ignore Mac and Linux.
MacOS is becoming less useful for unixy-type things like software development because so much of the terminal is rotting away (a combination of GPL3 antagonism ...
Nonsense. The Mac is still a better *nix develo
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No MacOS is not really suitable for gaming.
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That pretty well is what makes or breaks it now. Most mac users haven't realized it yet, but this isn't the 90s anymore. Most gamers aren't playing Odell Lake and Oregon Trail anymore.
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They also haven't supported EXTs, and go 2-3 years before adopting them. 2-3 years in the graphics world is an eternity. Not that you can't use them, but I think about .1% of programmers actually know how, Writing your own headers based on then the released ones takes about 20 minutes, if you know what you're doing. I supported that for like 8 years before work took up too much time to support it
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The GPU in my Mac laptop is ~30% higher performance than that.
Sure- my GPU isn't representative of the "average" Apple Silicon GPU (The M4 base comes in at like 1/3rd of an RTX3060), but even laughably shit chipsets like the Iris XE are at almost 40% the number of users as the 3060.
Not a great take on your part.
The thing that really fucks Macs for gaming is the shit vendor support, leading to an absurd cost for porting.
Macs have fucktons of games
GTX1650 fourth most popular card (Score:1)
Top GPU on the hardware survey is an RTX3060 (desktop).
And that is not what developers target. They target more modest cards. (1) Because laptops tend to have more modest chips optimized for power not performance. (2) Because that provides a larger potential market. Which is why a GTX1650 appears in the #1 position.
A lot of games will run fine on a GTX1060. Sure less eye candy, but still playable.
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And that is not what developers target. They target more modest cards. (1) Because laptops tend to have more modest chips optimized for power not performance. (2) Because that provides a larger potential market. Which is why a GTX1650 appears in the #1 position.
No.... it doesn't. The RTX3060 is in the top position [steampowered.com], which is why I selected it.
I'm not really sure what argument you're trying to make- that the 3060 isn't a particularly high-end card? Of course it's not- but the average person doesn't have a high-end card.
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And that is not what developers target. They target more modest cards. (1) Because laptops tend to have more modest chips optimized for power not performance. (2) Because that provides a larger potential market. Which is why a GTX1650 appears in the #1 position.
No.... it doesn't. The RTX3060 is in the top position [steampowered.com], which is why I selected it.
Sorry, typo. The GTX1650 in the #4 position. In other words its used quite a bit.
I'm not really sure what argument you're trying to make- that the 3060 isn't a particularly high-end card? Of course it's not- but the average person doesn't have a high-end card.
My point is that the average is below a 3060. Probably closer to that 1650. Keep in mind all the folks with laptops with embedded video. Good lord many of them have Intel GPUs. A 3060 might be a recommended target the the minimum will probably be that 1650. For something shipping today. For something that is starting development today, and won't be available for years, then that 3060 may be the minimum.
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My point is that the average is below a 3060. Probably closer to that 1650. Keep in mind all the folks with laptops with embedded video. Good lord many of them have Intel GPUs. A 3060 might be a recommended target the the minimum will probably be that 1650. For something shipping today. For something that is starting development today, and won't be available for years, then that 3060 may be the minimum.
The 3060 is the mode- the largest sample.
It's not the "average" by any means- but the largest portion of users have that card. It will be the performance target.
Nobody targets the average, because it's not a meaningful number.
Look at it this way- More people are using teh 3060, than all of the iGPUs combined.
That doesn't mean people aren't using iGPUs- it just means they're not the largest segment you can aim for.
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My point is that the average is below a 3060. Probably closer to that 1650. Keep in mind all the folks with laptops with embedded video. Good lord many of them have Intel GPUs. A 3060 might be a recommended target the the minimum will probably be that 1650. For something shipping today. For something that is starting development today, and won't be available for years, then that 3060 may be the minimum.
The 3060 is the mode- the largest sample.
Nice trivia, but that't not how one goes about picking the minimum and recommended GPU for a PC game. Also note that #1 3060's sample size represents 4.56%, the #4 1650 3.33%
Picking the recommended involves a base system and all upstream GPUs. Say 3060 is your base, add 30x0 where x is 6 or higher, 40x0 where x is 5 or higher and any 50x0. Now if 1650 is your base also add in 10x0 where x is 6 or greater, and 16x0 and 20x0 where x is 5 or greater. Do likely wise for AMD and Intel. Note on the Intel side
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Picking the recommended involves a base system and all upstream GPUs. Say 3060 is your base, add 30x0 where x is 6 or higher, 40x0 where x is 5 or higher and any 50x0. Now if 1650 is your base also add in 10x0 where x is 6 or greater, and 16x0 and 20x0 where x is 5 or greater. Do likely wise for AMD and Intel. Note on the Intel side you will find many more integrated GPUs that can reach the 1650 level than the 3060 level. The potential market for the 1650 level GPUs will be far larger than the potential market of the 3060 level. This is the sort of calculation game studio execs use. Answering the question of how far down do the minimum and recommended systems have to go to have a sufficiently sized market. 3060 would be too small today. Well, for a developer whose revenue is retail game based. IF the developer happens to license their game engine for big bucks, then they may be willing to go for better GPUs, and sacrifice retail sales, in order to attract licensing fees from other developers. Other developers will not be concerned about such a game engine requiring better GPUs today, it'll be years before their game is ready and such GPUs will then be far more common and represent a more interesting sized market.
Go now, and make a list of games that recommend an Intel iGPU. I'll wait.
Uh, no. Integrated GPUs far outnumber the 3060. Besides not understanding how game studios pick required and recommended GPUs, you are failing to recognize the bias of the Steam Survey. It's more weighted towards 3D shooters. If you look at data for strategy, RPG, etc you will see very different numbers. That data is, as far as I know, is proprietary.
Not in the stats, you ignorant fucking shit-for-brains. Fucking hell.
That's what we were talking about.
The target is not people who don't buy games.
Seriously, every fucking thing you ever claim goes directly against every thing that is observable to anyone. It's fucking ridiculous. How the fuck does the alternate reality you spin for yourself persist?
Re: (Score:2)
Picking the recommended involves a base system and all upstream GPUs. Say 3060 is your base, add 30x0 where x is 6 or higher, 40x0 where x is 5 or higher and any 50x0. Now if 1650 is your base also add in 10x0 where x is 6 or greater, and 16x0 and 20x0 where x is 5 or greater. Do likely wise for AMD and Intel. Note on the Intel side you will find many more integrated GPUs that can reach the 1650 level than the 3060 level. The potential market for the 1650 level GPUs will be far larger than the potential market of the 3060 level. This is the sort of calculation game studio execs use. Answering the question of how far down do the minimum and recommended systems have to go to have a sufficiently sized market. 3060 would be too small today. Well, for a developer whose revenue is retail game based. IF the developer happens to license their game engine for big bucks, then they may be willing to go for better GPUs, and sacrifice retail sales, in order to attract licensing fees from other developers. Other developers will not be concerned about such a game engine requiring better GPUs today, it'll be years before their game is ready and such GPUs will then be far more common and represent a more interesting sized market.
Go now, and make a list of games that recommend an Intel iGPU. I'll wait.
Re-read, note "minimum and recommended". The Integrated GPUs will be on the minimum list.
Uh, no. Integrated GPUs far outnumber the 3060. Besides not understanding how game studios pick required and recommended GPUs, you are failing to recognize the bias of the Steam Survey. It's more weighted towards 3D shooters. If you look at data for strategy, RPG, etc you will see very different numbers. That data is, as far as I know, is proprietary.
Not in the stats, you ignorant fucking shit-for-brains. Fucking hell.That's what we were talking about.
(1) They are in the Steam stats. Intel Iris Xe Graphics 1.94%, Intel(R) UHD Graphics, 1.76% +0.11%, etc.
(2) There are also proprietary stats that game studios will use because Steam is a bit first person shooter biased. Other game genres use other games to investigate the market.
(3) I've had access to these propriet
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MacOS is perfectly "suitable" for gaming.
It however lacks official APIs that would make the porting burden low for game developers, and a market that isn't as interesting in gaming as the PC market.
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MacOS is perfectly "suitable" for gaming. It however lacks official APIs that would make the porting burden low for game developers,
It is a low burden for game developers, a fraction of the cost, and for parallel development it helps the PC side. Cross platform development is great for debugging. Different compilers, different operating system, and maybe even different CPU architectures, they combine make bugs visible. The problem is with the studio management.
and a market that isn't as interesting in gaming as the PC market.
Some people need to buy a Mac, that does not mean they are uninterested in the PC game hits.
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It is a low burden for game developers, a fraction of the cost, and for parallel development it helps the PC side.
No, it is not.
Cross platform development is great for debugging.
No, it is not.
Different compilers, different operating system, and maybe even different CPU architectures, they combine make bugs visible.
They bring their own bugs.
arm vs. x86 has silly problems like stacks growing in different directions, Metal vs. DirectX vs. OpenGL vs. Vulkan all require subtle changes to your rendering pipeline which all accounts for more code to maintain and handle interrelations with those moving targets that become more bugs.
Some people need to buy a Mac, that does not mean they are uninterested in the PC game hits.
Nor is that remotely relevant to what was said.
I have a Mac and a PC. I didn't have to buy a Mac, I just really like the hardware. But I am far, far, far from the norm
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It is a low burden for game developers, a fraction of the cost, and for parallel development it helps the PC side.
No, it is not.
Sorry, been there, done that. The real world cost of ports shows otherwise.
Cross platform development is great for debugging.
No, it is not.
Sorry, been there, done that. In gaming, in engineering projects, in scientific projects. Heard plenty of "how the f*ck is the current code running" soft of comments in all these areas when I get back to the original devs regarding bugs I'm finding in the current code. Port a project to a new platform, especially where there is different hardware. Odds are likely you will find various bugs in the code. And when you tell the origin d
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Sorry, been there, done that. The real world cost of ports shows otherwise.
Incorrect.
Sorry, been there, done that. In gaming, in engineering projects, in scientific projects. Heard plenty of "how the f*ck is the current code running" soft of comments in all these areas when I get back to the original devs regarding bugs I'm finding in the current code. Port a project to a new platform, especially where there is different hardware. Odds are likely you will find various bugs in the code. And when you tell the origin devs about it you will often hear words such as "how the f*ck did this ever" work. Sometimes bugs manifest in a very difficult to observe or recreate manner. On a different platform it may be wildly obvious. I've had Windows dev who learned this and when struggling to recreate a bug came over and asked to try things on a Mac. Bad pointer trashed something unimportant on Windows, something important on Mac. And this is not specific to games. I've seen the same thing at engineering focused companies and at science focused companies.
Incorrect.
Rarely. They are most likely exposing an existing and unknown bug. I've built non-UI on Linux even when the product was Windows only. Even the different compiler warning helped find bugs in the Windows source. Add a little script based regressing testing when building the non-ui code into a Linux console app and even more bugs are likely to be found.
Incorrect.
And yet Mac developers do so successfully all the time. Yes, there is sometimes work to replicate in platform specific code. But these usually occur when the original code is being reworked, refactored, updated, etc. And now we are back to the Mac porting will probably find currently unknown bugs in the Windows code. Also, we've gotten to the point where some of this work can be automated or handled by a library. MoltenVK is a software library which allows Vulkan applications to run on top of Metal on Apple's macOS, iOS, and tvOS operating systems. It is the first software component to be released for the Vulkan Portability Initiative, a project to have a subset of Vulkan run on platforms lacking native Vulkan drivers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]... [wikipedia.org]
Mostly incorrect.
MoltenVK works fine- and it's how we run vulkan on Macs right now- its performance is just utterly dismal.
Except for the fact that these people constitute a sizable chunk of the Mac gaming market.
[citation needed]
Great. Me too. However may people only have one, and they need a Mac for one reason or another. They would still like to play games.
Fair. And they will, if Apple ever embraces open standards, because no matter how many times you scream from the sky that maintaining architecturally distinct codebases not only doesn't cost anything, but reduces costs!!!!, you will continue to be wrong.
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Sorry, been there, done that. The real world cost of ports [a small fraction of original PC game] shows otherwise.
Incorrect.
Sorry, been there, done that [porting to new platforms and finding numerous bugs in existing code]. In gaming, in engineering projects, in scientific projects. Heard plenty of "how the f*ck is the current code running" sort of comments in all these areas when I get back to the original devs regarding bugs I'm finding in the current code ...
Incorrect.
Rarely. They are most likely exposing an existing and unknown bug. I've built non-UI on Linux even when the product was Windows only. Even the different compiler warning helped find bugs in the Windows source. Add a little script based regressing testing when building the non-ui code into a Linux console app and even more bugs are likely to be found.
Incorrect.
You are just displaying your ignorance.
Also, we've gotten to the point where some of this work can be automated or handled by a library. MoltenVK is a software library which allows Vulkan applications to run on top of Metal on Apple's macOS, ...
Mostly incorrect. MoltenVK works fine- and it's how we run vulkan on Macs right now- its performance is just utterly dismal.
It's new. First you get it working. Then you make it perform. It's still an emerging option. And if its not fit for a project today, then the work is not terribly different than the old DirectX to OpenGL ports. Which, again, were part of porting projects that were a small fraction of the cost of the original PC game.
Except for the fact that these people constitute a sizable chunk of the Mac gaming market.
[citation needed]
Or read my next sentence where you agree. :-)
Great. Me too. However may people only have one, and they need a Mac for one reason or another. They would still like to play games.
Fair. And they will, if Apple ever embraces open standards, because no matter how many times you scream from the sky that maintaining architecturally distinct codebases not only doesn't cost anything, but reduces costs!!!!, you will continue to be wrong.
I Neve said "doesn't cost anything". I said the porting cost is a small fraction of the original PC cost, plus
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1) Pick any conclusion you make.
2) Write "All available evidence to the contrary."
I Neve said "doesn't cost anything". I said the porting cost is a small fraction of the original PC cost, plus the port will assist the PC side by revealing undiscovered bugs.
All available evidence to the contrary.
You are wrong, and impressively so.
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I Neve said "doesn't cost anything". I said the porting cost is a small fraction of the original PC cost, plus the port will assist the PC side by revealing undiscovered bugs.
All available evidence to the contrary. You are wrong, and impressively so.
Nope. I've been in the game industry for over a decade, involved in numerous AAA game ports. I've also done cross platform work on engineering and scientific projects.
In other words, I've done and seen these things you deny in your ignorance.
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Considering the lack of Vulkan support with MacOS and the weaker graphic cards:
I think you are confused about what cards developers target. It's not the high end. The fourth most poplar GPU on that survey is a GTX1650. Now consider all the modest chips in laptops. No, those "weaker" graphics cards are part of your target market or you are leaving money on the table.
Supporting different graphics APIs is nothing new to Mac developers. Plus there are things like MoltenVK, a Vulkan implementation for macOS that translates Vulkan API calls into Metal.
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The real problem with Mac gaming lies with game studio upper management. That's another story, a long one. Short answer, they are leaving money on the table when they ignore Mac and Linux.
I can run more and more Windows games on Linux. You can run them on the mac, too, but you've got to pay the cost of emulation.
The Mac is still a better *nix development platform since you get both *nix and the commercial world on the same desktop.
A very small subset thereof.
and MacOS being ridiculously locked down in newer versions) ...
Nonsense, macOS is not locked down like iOS.
Nobody claimed it was locked down "like iOS".
Both a Mac and a Windows PC offers a superior development environment by letting you have commercial and Linux side by side on the same desktop.
You know you can run Windows in a VM on Linux, right? For those "commercial" packages? Then you don't have Windows on the metal where it absolutely does not belong.
Mac converts x86_64 game code to native ARM64 (Score:2)
The real problem with Mac gaming lies with game studio upper management. That's another story, a long one. Short answer, they are leaving money on the table when they ignore Mac and Linux.
I can run more and more Windows games on Linux. You can run them on the mac, too, but you've got to pay the cost of emulation.
Nope. Or more accurately, the cost of translation, which is quite minimal. ARM based Macs do not emulate Windows game. There is a binary x86_64 to binary ARM64 translation. A one time event.
If you want to argue native ARM code from the developer, sure, but that's a game studio management problem.
The Mac is still a better *nix development platform since you get both *nix and the commercial world on the same desktop.
A very small subset thereof.
Compared to Windows, but not compared to Linux. Pretty much anything on Linux also runs on Mac, and many FOSS project offer native builds for Mac too.
and MacOS being ridiculously locked down in newer versions) ...
Nonsense, macOS is not locked down like iOS.
Nobody claimed it was locked down "like iOS".
Then what did you mean when you said it was locked? Since it i
Re: Only 97.31% more to go! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Only 97.31% more to go! (Score:4, Interesting)
Well it's about twice as high as macos at the moment, so there's that.
Well given that we're talking specifically about people running Steam, that's not too surprising... quite a few Steam games don't work on the Mac (even on the Intel Mac).
I'm actually shocked the Windows percentage is as high as it is (95%) - I thought more people had the SteamDesk than is apparently the case.
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It's important to note that the statistic in TFS is NOT a poll of "this is how many people are using each OS as their daily driver". This is *only* about what platforms people are running Steam on.
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Re: Only 97.31% more to go! (Score:2)
No, it's not about twice as much. It's 45% more, not 100%. Thereâs a big difference.
thanks pewdiepie (Score:4, Interesting)
Pewdiepie recently did a video [youtube.com] where he installed arch linux and customized it.
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Good, I need a tutorial from a reliable source.
Seamless (Score:3)
I'm not even in the top list of linux's relatively small slice of steam market share (Fedora) but I e found the experience to be pretty seamless.
Re: Seamless (Score:1)
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You probably are. They count the flatpak runtime all in one big blob, and I think most Fedora users are actually in there, not in the Fedora category.
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I use the rpmfusion repo, not a fan of flatpaks and snaps etc. https://docs.fedoraproject.org... [fedoraproject.org]
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Sure, but what I mean is, Fedora is probably a bigger chunk than is being counted, as while you may not use Flatpak, a large number of Fedora users do, and I think Flatpak is #3 or #4 in the rankings.
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Ahhh, I got you. Thanks for the clarification... yes, it seems likely a chunk of those flatpaks are on Fedora. IIRC Mint includes flatpak by default now, too.
Microsoft's enshitttification (Score:5, Interesting)
The real question is, how many businesses will move away from Microsoft's unashamed move into spyware and data piracy? One would think that people facing HIPAA would be the first to abandon Microsoft's enshittification but it is not happening.
Re:Microsoft's enshitttification (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft allows businesses to control the amount of data privacy they offer to enterprise customers. That privacy comes, of course, at a cost, but businesses will pay it. Microsoft will even sign HIPAA Business Associate Agreements (BAA) with healthcare providers and other businesses covered by HIPAA. Essentially, a BAA says that Microsoft will abide by HIPAA privacy laws and makes itself liable for any breaches caused by its products, should a provider be fined under HIPAA. https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
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If you're on an azure government tenant, then they really can't fuck with your data. AFAICT azure government was left unscathed by the last few azure data breaches that affected basically every single commercial tenant. My guess as to why they don't offer the same level of protection to commercial tenants is because there are strict controls in place where, unless you're a legal US person (and even then, not likely without citizenship AND a squeaky clean criminal record) then they're not going to let you an
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Still, not sure why they don't offer the same level of technical protections that are mandated by US law for government entities and commercial entities that are subject to the more stringent export control laws.
I think this question answers itself. Of *course* government mandated protections will apply to government equipment to which the mandates apply. Why would they apply outside that scope, when those protections are counter to Microsoft's business model? For the government, the business model works, because the government can and will pay for that protection. Regular people won't.
As a private individual, you *can* pay for and get a license that will afford you the same privacy protections offered to the gover
Re: (Score:3)
Every new version of Windows generates howls of protest from "tech-savvy people," who then end up sticking with Windows anyway. People always want things to stay just like they were. But a 95%+ market share, as stated in the summary, says that the vast majority have decided that Windows is still the best option. At least, that's how *most* people would read a 95% market share.
Re: Microsoft's enshitttification (Score:2)
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The problem with older devices is real. But the people who have these devices tend *not* to be tech savvy people, who as a group generally want newer, better performing equipment.
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when 10 came out, i think all of 15 games ran on linux via ports, and 10 installed on every last piece of hardware that could run 7.
Re: Microsoft's enshitttification (Score:2)
Less than 30% of my roughly 500 titles library shows as supported under Linux, few of which are modern AAA titles. There are probably quite a few indie games supported mainly because they use Unity and it makes it cheap and easy, but there are almost no devs specifically targeting Linux.
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Like Eve Online is not officially supported, but works fine.
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There are some games that don't work due to anticheat [areweanticheatyet.com] but even with those sometimes a different version works
Re: Microsoft's enshitttification (Score:2)
While tech-savvy people around here might number close to 100%, in the general population, this number is well below 5%. So even if 100% of the /. crowd live up to the comments on this site, that translates to nothing important in the real world. Itâ(TM)s clear though that many people on this site donâ(TM)t care that much and choose Windows anyway.
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"Tech Savvy" people represent a much smaller group than you think. And many of them, including myself, moved to an alternative OS when Win11 was announced and have been getting along just fine. The vast majority of my team moved off windows years ago, so it's incorrect to say they stick with windows. What's correct is they represent a tiny fraction of the market base.
The year of the Linux Desktop has been here for some time, and the increasing compatibility with the SteamOS portfolio of games will see mo
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The year of the Linux Desktop has been here for some time
I would mod this "funny" if I could. Linux desktop adoption is still below 5% and not likely to reach 5% any time soon.
Among software developers, Windows desktops still rule, at about 64%, and growing. Linux desktops are at 43% and shrinking. https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com] So it seems incorrect to say that technical users are "moving from Windows to Linux."
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The other way to interpret that data is to acknowledge that highly skilled tech workers are a shrinking population being replaced by AI agents and "Vibe" coding.
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"Vibe coding" is not yet prime time. It's a sales pitch. Recipe Ninja was recently held up as an example of real code built using Vibe Coding. https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org] But if you actually try the site https://www.recipeninja.ai/ [recipeninja.ai] you will quickly see that it has many problems. The first glance looks good, but try to actually _use_ the site, and it starts to fall flat. This is the Achilles heel of "vibe" coding--it generates some plausible code, but it needs lots of edits and curation and hand-tuning
Re: (Score:2)
Not replaced... slowly made extinct because there is no longer an incentive to get a deep understanding of the underlying code. People entering the field will, by and large, not invest themselves any further than necessary, relying on the tools to do the work for them.
Whats on the horizon are only "highly skilled prompt writers"
Re: (Score:2)
You sound like people in the 80's, lamenting that programmers no longer knew how to write assembly code, all they knew was high-level languages. As the high level languages got better, there was no longer any need to understand the assembly or machine code that was generated by the compiler.
AI is nowhere near that. AI spits out code, but 90% of the time, it needs hand-tweaks to work right. It's going to be a long time before we can stop worrying about knowing how to code.
Re: Microsoft's enshitttification (Score:3)
I suspect most of this change is already due to Windows changes. While as observed, the shift is small, I've still never seen so many people saying they were switching at one time before.
When my Win10 machine can no longer run my games.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll be switching to Linux exclusively. If the game won't run on Linux then I won't buy the game.
Pretty much everything else I need to use a computer for is FOSS anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
Anyone still using Windows for actual work should give Macs or Linux a shot. Get the hell off that shit OS.
Re: (Score:3)
Give linux a shot, it's surprising how many games work via steam or wine(once you remove the distro wine/mesa and install newer release)
I prefer Mint/mate or xfce for desktop.
Re: (Score:2)
Game functionality on linux has progressed effing lightyears since 2005, and I support it every step of the way (and keep an up-to-date Crossover license to help fund the amazing Wine work that keeps moving that ball forward)
But now the brass tacks... Of my library of ~1300.. 1600? I can't remember- about 200 are "verified". Many more are "playable" of course- but Y very much will V. Some thin
Arch at 10%? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I think it is that a more fanatical Linux user is more likely to use Arch, so where quite many mint or Ubuntu users might do most of their things on Linux, they might dual boot and use Windows for gaming, but an Arch user is less likely to do that and will thus game on Arch.
Re: (Score:2)
It is super popular with the "people who really like to have bad experiences" crowd right now, though, who are also more likely to try gaming on linux.
Re: (Score:2)
Arch is 17.5% if you sum CachyOS, EndeavourOS and Manjaro which are Arch derivatives.
Re: (Score:2)
I understand that Ubuntu can largely be combined (likely with Mint too), but Arch at 10% is surprising. Am I missing something here? Does Arch do really good with Steam?
Arch is the most bleeding edge Linux that isn't Gentoo. That's most of the story. It's also reputed to have better multiarch than other distributions. Certainly multiarch sucks on all Debian-based systems...
3 more Arch devices from me (Score:1)
Ubuntu Core (Score:2)
I'm interested that Ubuntu Core beats out the mainline Ubuntu. A quick search doesn't reveal any device people would be Steam gaming on in this way.
Multi-year high & credit where credit is due (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been gaming on Linux for a very long time. But I partially attribute my multi-year high to the nearby dispensary.
Joking (or not) aside, I often wonder why there is so much anger from a tiny but loud minority of Windows gamers. Actually it's more accurate to label them anti-Linux gamers, because most Windows gamers are reasonable folks in my experience. Why can't I be allowed to game on Linux? How am I ruining Steam for you? Isn't more choice better for everyone?
Windows 95?! (Score:1)
Skimming the story quickly, I was first shocked at the percentage Windows 95 still has, before realizing that overall Windows share just happens to be 95 something percent ;)